How aviation safety has improved

In the meantime, the aviation business proceeds to innovate, most lately with the introduction of composite materials and the growing use of electronic engineering and electronics.

“The new generation of airliners are incredibly modern, but it will acquire time – at least a number of decades – to see how resistant the materials will be,” claims Thomas Cahlik, Head of Mediterranean, Aviation, AGCS.

Quite a few of the new systems have served boost basic safety, this sort of as better cockpit instrumentation shows and fly-by-wire techniques. Nonetheless, technological know-how has a
prospective for building unanticipated penalties, according to Jon Downey, Head of Aviation – US, AGCS.

“Once, pilots relied on their ‘steam gauges’ and experienced incredibly little are living knowledge at their fingertips. Now the data readily available can be frustrating,” he claims.

Whilst ‘glass cockpit’ engineering provides significantly much better visible recognition it also raises troubles, as was observed in the loss of the Air France Flight 447 in 2009 with 228 people today on-board. Accident investigators concluded that the pilots turned baffled by the plane’s instrumentation and took inappropriate motion when the Airbus 330 flew into turbulence for the duration of a tropical thunderstorm around the Atlantic Ocean.

Considerations in excess of pilot’s reliance on automation in the cockpit were also lifted by the Asiana crash in 2013.

“What we see now is an increasing reliance on technology, that pilots may perhaps not fully understand, that at some point this can diminish a pilot’s situational consciousness and stick and rudder techniques,” says Downey.